Reevely: City hall shows rare courage with its plan to legalize Uber

Local Unifor 1688 President Amrik Singh of the taxi union sits in the council chambers as the city of Ottawa releases it's proposal to change taxi regulations that will include the existence of Private Transportation Companies like Uber. Wayne Cuddington / Ottawa Citizen

Ottawa plans to open its streets up to ride-sharing companies like Uber by summer, letting the company and its drivers compete with traditional taxis as long as they meet some basic safety and insurance standards.

There could be blood on those streets first.

In brief, drivers for Uber or other ride-sharing companies that might want to set up here will have to pass a detailed criminal-record check, present their cars for safety inspections and prove they have $5 million in liability insurance, none of which they’re doing — to the city’s satisfaction — as they drive today. They’ll pay a 10.5-cent-a-ride fee to cover the city’s regulatory costs, and be restricted to picking up riders who’ve summoned them via an app.

The city will regulate Uber the way it regulates restaurants: it’ll make sure the kitchen isn’t dirty but it won’t taste the food.

Uber’s drivers will compete against taxi drivers who’ve had their regulations slashed. A mandatory cabbie-training course? Gone. Minimum requirements for vehicle sizes and trunk space? Gone, and the maximum age of a cab raised to 10 years. Licence fees? Cut in half, or to zero for drivers of wheelchair-accessible taxis. Traditional cabbies will be able to pick people up when they’re hailed on the street, or via apps or phone calls, and they’ll be the only drivers allowed to accept payment in cash.

Taxis will have a cap on their fares but be able to charge less if they want to undercut Uber. Also, taxi users will know there are security cameras in the cars and an avenue of complaint to the city if they’re unhappy about something. If you fight with Uber, you fight alone.

Just a few years ago, the city reinforced the obsolete taxi-plate system that has limited competition and distorted the market. This is a 180.

“We’re taking the handcuffs off the taxi industry,” declared Coun. Diane Deans, who chairs the council committee in charge of Ottawa’s taxi bylaw as she announced the proposed changes to the rules Thursday.

Taxi drivers listening to the presentation in city hall’s council chamber stormed out partway through, cursing. They like the handcuffs, you see, because they’re made of silver.

“Why no rules for Uber? What, are we second-class citizens here?” taxi union leader Amrik Singh demanded outside the chamber. “Are we not going to drive the same people? Do not the people of Ottawa deserve the same treatment? … We will not honour it! This is my promise.”

(Uber is reserving judgment for a few days. But the rules proposed here look a lot like the ones Edmonton has recently adopted, which Uber has said it can live with.)

The people who will really be hurt are the owners of the limited taxi plates, which will still exist but no longer be the blue-chip investments they once were. Their value probably fell by tens of thousands of dollars in a few minutes Thursday afternoon. This will be hard, very hard, on drivers who own their own plates. For a whole lot of others, who only rent them from non-driving owners, it won’t be as painful.

The thing is, Uber’s arrival in Ottawa started that decline in spite of the city’s efforts to stop it. This can be a power-dive or a controlled descent, but it’s going to happen either way because the customers are already moving.

Taxi drivers have burned whatever public goodwill they might have had with their roadblocks and violent Airport Parkway demonstrations, their vigilante attacks on suspected Uber drivers, their videotaped harassments of tourists, their main union’s trashing of their main dispatcher’s offices. Singh on Thursday promised his members will stay within the law, but they haven’t in the past.

The cabbies seem to think they’re the scrappy heroes of this story, which is a grave error.

Coventry Connections has rushed to improve service with things like an Uber-like app, but nobody seriously believes they’d have done it without Uber breathing down their necks. They’re not the good guys, either.

Nor are the Uber people. The company’s a corporate bully, flouting the law and all but daring the politicians to do something about it. That its behaviour in Ottawa and other cities gets rewarded is a pity.

Now that the changes are out in the open, we’ll see whether our councillors have the steel to see them through.

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